Tuesday, February 12, 2008

An amazing find!

Or so I thought.

We realized this weekend that neither of us had been up in the loft of our garage yet. There's no ladder or stairs, and there really hasn't been too much urgency to get up there. But I saw the corner of an old-fashioned storm window, so I dragged our short ladder to at least get my head beyond the loft floor.

And I saw this:

How exciting! It looks like it's filled with books!! Since our immediate previous owners were the government, there's not been much left of the real people who lived in the house. This was the first interesting sign of life that we'd seen. But I had to take these pictures holding my arm up and aiming the camera blindly and we didn't really have time to mess with it, so I decided to save it for another time.

An hour or so later, I returned from one of our many trips to the store, and Adam told me he had climbed up and pulled the box down-- it was a set of encyclopedias. Copyright from the 1920s. Useless, but interesting, nonetheless. I ran out to the garage to have a look at our booty, and what I saw looked strangely familiar:

Yep. In his haste, he missed the L in the Roman numeral copyright date. They were the exact same set of 1979 Funk & Wagnall's encyclopedias that my family started collecting not long after I was born. You could get them at the Safeway (we lived across the street from it) with green stamps, or the equivalent, and they sold yearly updates. We got a set of dishes for my first college apartment the same way.

So, although they are 30 years old (yikes!) and might otherwise be interesting for nostalgia, they're the same exact damn books I looked at and did my school reports from before the invasion of the shiny new internets. Not even different encyclopedias.

What are the odds.

*Actually, the odds are pretty good-- that Safeway was only about 6 or 8 blocks from this house. Come to think of it, I sure moved around a lot to end up pretty close to where I started. I'm not too sure what to think of that.